Originally written in 1950 but not published in Germany until 1962. Translated and published in English in 2008.

Well, I couldn't make out heads or tails about what the author was trying to portray. It's one thing when it's a book of big words that require you to pause and look up their meanings for better understanding, but it's a whole different ballgame when the author's writing is nothing but riddles, talking in circles and full of repetitive sentences with underlying meanings. Forget the fact that I couldn't even decide who was talking or what exactly they were doing.

I really wanted to try and appreciate this guys writing because of his experience and survival through the holocaust, but the structure of the novel was all over the place. Still, I did give it my very best shot and read through page 100 and would have finished regardless, if only I understood even a little bit.

Although a novel, Adler's real life is supposedly portrayed in the character of Paul Lustig, the only surviving member of his family. ( )

The Journey is a poetic nightmare about a family's ordeal and the survival of one member. The Lustig family, led by patriarch Leopold, is "forbidden" to live, surviving in a society where "everyone was mad, and once they finally grasped what was going on, it was too late." It portrays the unfathomable in a way that is both intriguing and enlightening to the modern reader, similar to the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. ( )

If you have read quite a few books about the Holocaust, you will probably find this one interesting. But if you're coming for the first time to reading about how people experienced, and sometimes survived, the horrors of the WWII death camps, you may find that there is not enough background information in this novel to give you a full picture. ( )

A powerful story about a man finding an obscure German ovel in Harvard Square. I could not put this book down and I urge anyone interested in the Holocaust to pick this up to read. It is a treasure